It’s almost cliché that tech innovations happen in the high-end, for-profit segment long before they filter down to the masses, where innovation could serve the greatest social good. ICON and New Story are challenging that premise...

You can 3D print just about anything these days and now you can add a house to the list. The first of its kind, the Icon 3D-Printed House was spawned from the desire to provide shelter for the 1 billion people on the planet that don't have a place to call home. A collaboration with the non-profit New Story, the structures will be printed on a mobile printer called the Vulcan. It not only has the ability to produce an 800 square foot home but can do so in less than 24 hours and for a fraction of the cost of traditional construction. While the main goal is to help solve the global housing crisis, they also plan to use local labor, creating jobs in the process.

In rural El Salvador, a family living on $1.90 a day might live in a makeshift house with dirt floors, thin walls, and no running water. But next year, dozens of those families will move into one of the world’s first communities of 3D-printed homes...

...For the past 10 months, New Story has tinkered away with construction technology company ICON to design a 3-D printer for building homes in regions of the world that lack the economic resources to house their poorest citizens. Today, the companies are showing off the fruits of their labor: an 800-square-foot structure in Austin, Texas, and the first 3-D printed house in the country built to local housing code....